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Old Movies Are Projected Onto Hundreds Of DVDs To Create Beautiful Audio-Visual Mosaic

Daniel Canogar is an artist who likes to re-appropriate old media to use as materials in his installations. Repurposing old DVDs in his piece Spin he uses their surfaces to project copied video content on to while remixing their soundtracks to create an immersive soundscape. In this way he asks us to ponder how we treat old and dead media and comments on our constant love affair with the new.

An exhibition of his work has recently opened at Sweden’s Bildmuseet institute titled Quadratura on through 21st April. And in a continuation of the technique used in his piece Spin, he created a work especially for the show called Sikka Magnum (above) which features 360 DVDs with movies and animations projected onto their surfaces to create an “audio-visual mosaic”.

These in turn reflect back out into the gallery space to create a swimming pool-like effect. As the DVDs radiate the projected images their mass turns into a kind of silvery filmic flower. That combined with the cascading sounds—which are the layered sounds from the projected films—creates a disorienting but mesmerizing environment combining the “phantasmagorical properties of cinema with its physical elements”. Canogar says the piece was “inspired by ‘sikka’, the gold coins sewn to clothing dating back to Babylonic times that eventually became the shiny plastic objects we know today as sequins.”

Also on display will be three other multimedia works (which you can see in the video below) which recycle old tech—35mm film, VHS, and analogue TVs—which Canogar again uses as screens to project animations on, breathing new life into these dead (or soon-to-be-dead) formats.

Waves

Canogar has also recently created a “sculptural LED video” called Waves suspended in the air in the atrium of 2 Houston Center in Houston, Texas. For this 24 foot sculpture, which mirrors the constant flux of people coming to and fro below it, Canogar used public-participation performance. For this he asked 90 workers, tenants, and passersby to perform over a green-screen surface while the artist filmed them using an over-head video camera, capturing them crawling, dancing, and cartwheeling.

The video sculpture, shown on bendable LED tiles (below), features the results of their efforts and starts off as a heaving mass of people on all fours before mutating into more abstract forms.